Thursday, May 24, 2012
SPYCOGA cont...
In other moments I am serene as a Buddha, calm as a Hindu cow, light and free as that dancing plastic bag in American Beauty. Multi-colored butterflies flirt around my skull, the waning light at sunset streams through the forest and into my eyes, the bright golden spears of light fracture into an infinite kaleidoscopic pattern of rainbows. This is real. This is not the fantasy world I live in, the one we all live in. This is the winking of the earth, a nihilistic nudge from our Maker. Moments like this I am conscious of my breath, conscious of the weight of my bones and muscle being held down onto the earth by gravity’s pull, conscious of my organs pulsing inside my body, aware of the steady beating of my heart within my chest, the thump thump thump thump that meters out the beat of my life, cognizant of the wind caressing my skin, conscious of everything around me and inside me, conscious of the moon and stars and planets circling, the universe of which we all are part and no one is separate. This lie of separateness is the plague of humanity, this cosmic con that there is anything to lose or anything to gain when we are all husks of dust glinting in the breeze. This comforts me. Death comforts me. I do not long for death but the irrefutable truth of death is difficult to not admire. I can’t wait for the veil to be lifted on this world. I know there is a loving, benevolent force to the universe. If I didn’t I would become a criminal.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Some places you can only go alone.
Some places you can only go alone. No one can go with you. You have to go by yourself.
Does anyone out there know what the hell is going on? Or are most of my brothers and sisters as confused as me. I’ve just been making it up as I go along. When I was younger I used to blame others for my troubles. Now I blame myself. Neither is healthy. My troubles? Manic depression. Alcoholism. My brain churns and churns. It burns and burns. I try to lock onto something for a while but then it gets used up and I’m on to the next for a new fix. It started with toys when I was a little kid as best I can remember. My parents spoiled me with toys. I became a collector. I had to have every single Star Wars figure that was available (even the ones only available for a limited time on the backs of cereal boxes.) And I did have them all. This was back in the early 1980’s, before Return of the Jedi, when the only figures they had was from the first two movies. For the first film’s figure set I needed a Jawa. My mother and I scoured the drug stores, department stores and toy stores looking for a Jawa but couldn’t find one. Late in the summer, before I started first grade in the fall, my mom and dad took us on vacation to Daytona Beach and Disney World. At a mall somewhere in between we finally found the Jawa action figure. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my friends. I had a good friend that was a fanatical collector like me and mom kindly bought him a Jawa too. The next figure I obsessed over was the medical droid B1B from The Empire Strikes Back. Again my collection was nearly complete; I had Luke, Han and Leia in Hoth gear. I had all the bounty hunters. I had the play sets to reenact my favorite scenes from the film. But B1B eluded me. My mother and I searched high and low but he was nowhere to be found. How was I to replay the scenes where the droid rehabilitates Luke, first by monitoring him in the hyperthermia tank, then later by reconstructing his hand after Darth Vader sliced it off with his red light saber? I felt I would never know until one day, when out of nowhere, I stumbled upon a B1B on the last row of cards on the rack I flipped through. It was a Super X drug store in Beckley, WV. I’ll never forget that moment.
This may seem like just a random observation of the curious behavior of a small child but it really speaks to something deeper in me. I chase. I capture. Then I move on. It is a sick cycle. I am the perfect consumer I was raised to be; I am never satisfied. I wish I could say that some 32 years later I have changed. But that just simply isn’t true. I moved on from Star Wars figures eventually, first to GI Joes, then to BMX bikes and then to skateboarding. I took all of it in, ate it up then moved on. My next fix became girls, then drugs and alcohol. I’ve been addicted to and obsessed over just about everything I’ve ever been interested in. When I started cooking professionally this trait brought me rewards. But the overall effect of such a tangled up mind is to be restless, irritable and discontent. Whatever it takes to not deal with what’s going on inside, the darkness in me that refuses the light.
My soul craves balance, harmony. But almost everything in how I’ve chosen to live my life rejects these ideas. For some reason I have to have things off-kilter for me to feel right. Remember the character of Ricky Bobby’s daddy in Talladega Nights? I’m just like him sadly. I get itchy when things seem to be going too well. I gotta throw a wrench in there somewhere and get everything going all good and haywire to sleep well at night. Time after time after time I’ve done this. Torpedoed any meaningful chance I might have at happiness with something or someone by getting the jitters and having that gnawing urgency to split, to bail, to tune out, shut down and blow off. The scars on my body attest to a strong tendency towards self-destruction. I’ve cut myself, burned myself, and drank myself into endless stupors thousands upon thousands of times. There have been times when I have made peace with the madness. This pretty much means that I just gave into it and let it do whatever it wanted with me. This led to blackout episodes coming to in strange places with no recollection of evenings prior. This led to 100 mile an hour car chases high on crystal meth. This led to waking up in my truck with a loaded gun in my lap and empty casings on the seat. I went to AA. I finally got sober and off of drugs, but the madness? The madness is here for keeps. It isn’t going anywhere. I have to learn to live with it. That’s what I’ve tried to do all along; to learn to live in this world and not go full crazy. It’s a tall mountain when you look at it. The history of the world, the history of people, where I fit into all of this… It’s hard not to feel irrelevant. It’s hard to go back up that mountain once you’ve come down. The sides are steep and rocky. There are deep thickets of briars and thorns. The rain won’t let up and the wind shakes the trees and scatters leaves over the path. Then the metaphor becomes belabored as fuck…
There was a boy in my dream last night. He was a tiny little blonde-haired thing, maybe about two years old. People were looking for him. He only appeared after everyone else was gone. He didn’t know I was there. I tricked him. I hid behind an old oak tree and spied on him. He came out of the ether and for a few frames he appeared in the sunlight, his white skin glowing in the rays. When I stepped out from behind the tree and called to him he vanished. No one would believe me that I saw him. They thought I was lying. I wasn’t lying. I saw him. I could go there now and he would appear for me. But that wouldn’t prove anything. He would only appear for me and no one else. Apparently he lived in a little broken down shack. I went inside once. Inside was an old worn out mattress, empty bottles and cans on the floor, sunlight streaming in cracked panes of glass.
There’s no glamor in madness. It’s not like in the movies. There’s nothing heroic about it. It feels like there is an invisible cage around your head, a birdcage that fits perfectly around the contours of the bones of your face and skull, the bars are hard as iron, like some twisted metaphysical metallurgy. Thoughts bounce around inside the cage and cause it to rattle. That’s you, walking around your days and nights in an invisible cage of rattling iron. Of course the cage can’t be seen. To all appearances you look normal. There is nothing that signifies this man is in a self-made prison. You have to look closer. People don’t want to; look closer that is. Most people are not interested in your pain when your pain is all that has ever interested in me. Everything else is window dressing and a bunch of pomp and circumstance. In my private thoughts alone I shatter store front windows with my mind, bend street lamps to the pavement, drop traffic lights into the crosswalk, crumble buildings, black the sky, set fire to the trees and houses…turn this beautiful place into the hell scape that is the inside of my skull staring back at me.
This may seem like just a random observation of the curious behavior of a small child but it really speaks to something deeper in me. I chase. I capture. Then I move on. It is a sick cycle. I am the perfect consumer I was raised to be; I am never satisfied. I wish I could say that some 32 years later I have changed. But that just simply isn’t true. I moved on from Star Wars figures eventually, first to GI Joes, then to BMX bikes and then to skateboarding. I took all of it in, ate it up then moved on. My next fix became girls, then drugs and alcohol. I’ve been addicted to and obsessed over just about everything I’ve ever been interested in. When I started cooking professionally this trait brought me rewards. But the overall effect of such a tangled up mind is to be restless, irritable and discontent. Whatever it takes to not deal with what’s going on inside, the darkness in me that refuses the light.
My soul craves balance, harmony. But almost everything in how I’ve chosen to live my life rejects these ideas. For some reason I have to have things off-kilter for me to feel right. Remember the character of Ricky Bobby’s daddy in Talladega Nights? I’m just like him sadly. I get itchy when things seem to be going too well. I gotta throw a wrench in there somewhere and get everything going all good and haywire to sleep well at night. Time after time after time I’ve done this. Torpedoed any meaningful chance I might have at happiness with something or someone by getting the jitters and having that gnawing urgency to split, to bail, to tune out, shut down and blow off. The scars on my body attest to a strong tendency towards self-destruction. I’ve cut myself, burned myself, and drank myself into endless stupors thousands upon thousands of times. There have been times when I have made peace with the madness. This pretty much means that I just gave into it and let it do whatever it wanted with me. This led to blackout episodes coming to in strange places with no recollection of evenings prior. This led to 100 mile an hour car chases high on crystal meth. This led to waking up in my truck with a loaded gun in my lap and empty casings on the seat. I went to AA. I finally got sober and off of drugs, but the madness? The madness is here for keeps. It isn’t going anywhere. I have to learn to live with it. That’s what I’ve tried to do all along; to learn to live in this world and not go full crazy. It’s a tall mountain when you look at it. The history of the world, the history of people, where I fit into all of this… It’s hard not to feel irrelevant. It’s hard to go back up that mountain once you’ve come down. The sides are steep and rocky. There are deep thickets of briars and thorns. The rain won’t let up and the wind shakes the trees and scatters leaves over the path. Then the metaphor becomes belabored as fuck…
There was a boy in my dream last night. He was a tiny little blonde-haired thing, maybe about two years old. People were looking for him. He only appeared after everyone else was gone. He didn’t know I was there. I tricked him. I hid behind an old oak tree and spied on him. He came out of the ether and for a few frames he appeared in the sunlight, his white skin glowing in the rays. When I stepped out from behind the tree and called to him he vanished. No one would believe me that I saw him. They thought I was lying. I wasn’t lying. I saw him. I could go there now and he would appear for me. But that wouldn’t prove anything. He would only appear for me and no one else. Apparently he lived in a little broken down shack. I went inside once. Inside was an old worn out mattress, empty bottles and cans on the floor, sunlight streaming in cracked panes of glass.
There’s no glamor in madness. It’s not like in the movies. There’s nothing heroic about it. It feels like there is an invisible cage around your head, a birdcage that fits perfectly around the contours of the bones of your face and skull, the bars are hard as iron, like some twisted metaphysical metallurgy. Thoughts bounce around inside the cage and cause it to rattle. That’s you, walking around your days and nights in an invisible cage of rattling iron. Of course the cage can’t be seen. To all appearances you look normal. There is nothing that signifies this man is in a self-made prison. You have to look closer. People don’t want to; look closer that is. Most people are not interested in your pain when your pain is all that has ever interested in me. Everything else is window dressing and a bunch of pomp and circumstance. In my private thoughts alone I shatter store front windows with my mind, bend street lamps to the pavement, drop traffic lights into the crosswalk, crumble buildings, black the sky, set fire to the trees and houses…turn this beautiful place into the hell scape that is the inside of my skull staring back at me.
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